Is pagination and SEO a mess?

[tornado]

Hi there.

I note there is reference to Genesis SEO pagination in the forum from several years ago. Where are we now?:

A site crawl by Moz shows one of my sites duplicating meta tags when the blog pages paginate. I looked into this. I found this article, published this week from Ahrefs which explains that having a canonical link on each blog page is the correct approach.

I have just checked Academy Pro and when I have a page set to Posts Page in Settings (for a blog), there is no canonical link on the first page, nor subsequent paginated pages. I am seeing this as a major SEO issue.

Interestingly, if I use query_args to display posts, the canonical link displays but the page title vanishes. This happens across themes so I guess is a WordPress issue.

I don't want to use a category page to display my blog page.

Canonical links are on category pagination.

I don't want to use an SEO plugin.

What are your thoughts?

I would also be keen to know, from an SEO standpoint, if there are implications to having a homepage blank (despite the homepage itself not appearing to be blank due to widget implementation) - which is needed for configurations that wish to allocate a Posts Page.

Thanks in advance.

[tornado]

In addition to the above: the canonical link that displays with query_args on paginated pages points to the first page of the blog, which is not what I want, as it essentially tells Google that paginated pages should be ignored.

Am I missing something here or is this all a bit of a mess?

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